"Tired ?" Jacob Welse put both hands on Frona's shoulders, and his eyes spoke the love his stiff tongue could not compass.

The tree and the excitement and the pleasure were over with, a score or so of children had gone home frostily happy across the snow, the last guest had departed, and Christmas Eve and Christmas Day were blending into one.
She returned his fondness with glad-eyed interest, and they dropped into huge comfortable chairs on either side the fireplace, in which the back-log was falling to ruddy ruin.
"And this time next year ?" He put the question seemingly to the glowing log, and, as if in ominous foreshadow, it flared brightly and crumbled away in a burst of sparks.
"It is marvellous," he went on, dismissing the future in an effort to shake himself into a wholesomer frame of mind.

"It has been one long continuous miracle, the last few months, since you have been with me.
We have seen very little of each other, you know, since your childhood, and when I think upon it soberly it is hard to realize that you are really mine, sprung from me, bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.

As the tangle-haired wild young creature of Dyea,--a healthy, little, natural animal and nothing more,--it required no imagination to accept you as one of the breed of Welse.

But as Frona, the woman, as you were to-night, as you are now as I look at you, as you have been since you came down the Yukon, it is hard.